Customer - Time Sheet

I have a simple excel based tempalte that I use to track the time spent on projects. I have attached it. Hope it helps

I am just testing a system from fanurio for time tracking. It is for freelancers, but only $59, so perhaps worth it in an organization as well. It allows you to track your time through a timer and you can create timesheets, project reports, invoicing. I'm only on the trial, so I don't have tons of experience with it yet, but so far I really like it: http://www.fanuriotimetracking.com/index.html. You spend a little bit of time setting up your project, but then the timer just tracks your time automatically.

Hi

Thank you Jason for the template. How detailed do you fill in the "Task" Column? Would you e.g.  just write "Design changes" or would you write, "change of colours, sizing, change of animation"....

Or perhaps, until I have experience write everything down in detail, give the client a more basic list and then have something if he still wants more...

And Holly thanks for the great link. I'm always jotting down the time - this could make that part a lot simpler!

Let me first some brief background . My organization, like many, tracks the level of effort (LOE) to design and produce a course. I have found it easiest to do this by splitting the effort into a few general "tasks". They are:

• Instructional design,
• quality reviews,
• production,
• administration (meetings, upload to our LMS, etc...)

More often than not I put one of the items listed above in the task field. The items above could be further broken down if you so desire, but in general I stay at a pretty high level. Obviously the tasks that you choose need to work for your client or your organization, but hopefully the template i provided can be used as a starting point for your situation.

Hope the clairification helped.

Thanks, Jason! It certainly doesn't have to be complicated to be useful. 

Although I have worked with some folks over the years that would probably disagree with that  

That's not bad but as you grow think about an actual project management software such as MS Project where you can quickly see with pert and gant charts how much time you spent on something. As the number of projects grow, you will be able to quickly say from previous examples the cost for this project will  cost X and it will take Y hours to complete. BTW if you want to keep track of time and you use MS Outook simply use a tasker. They have timers on them and you can start, stop and save them.

Thanks again, Jason. I think I'll also start with giving fairly general tasks. That would certainly make my life easier.

Longterm I think looking at MS Project would be good. Thanks for that idea, James. It would certainly be great if I could easily come up with the cost and time involved...

Check out Paymo.biz. It's free for a small number of users, I'm not sure what the limit is before you have to move to the subscription price. You can set up clients (including pricing), projects, tasks and use the timer to punch in and out.  At first I found it really difficult to use as I often multi-task, but I've come to see that I'm actually more productive by staying focused on one thing at a time. There are reports and invoicing capabilities as well. We've been using it for about 6 months now, and so far so good!

Thanks Diana. That does look really good! Unfortunately I'm not allowed to store any company data on a server outside or even add any software that hasn't gone through a screening process. Which is understandable but often a shame as I often can't use the freebies. :-(

Hi,

We have been using Replicon's ( www.replicon.com/olp/corporate-time-tracking-software.aspx ) software for all our business needs. Invoicing is the task that would take up a lot of my time at office. When I came to know about this software, I just gave it a try. To my surprise this software could handle a lot more tasks than just invoicing and it has made many of the difficult tasks very easy.The payments are processed at a great speed and our vendors are quite happy to transact with us for this reason.

Thanks!

Has anyone tried Do.com.. I believe it is a SalesForce product.  It is free and I am just now trying it out.  It is for managing projects and collaboration teams.  I work with two other people right now so I think this might be a good start...but I don't want to waste too much time if someone has tried it and found lots of propblems with it.